The student, who attended Polo Park Middle School, told a school administrator that he was talking loudly in class Oct. 14 when teacher Guyette Duhart told him he needed to have his mouth washed out with soap, the investigation found.

Duhart then grabbed a bottle of hand sanitizer from her desk, investigators said, and told the student to approach her.

Six students told investigators that Duhart then pumped hand sanitizer into the student’s mouth, a district investigation found.

Duhart admitted to holding the sanitizer near his mouth but claimed the student grabbed the bottle himself and pumped it into his own mouth.

The student spit onto the floor and left the classroom, the investigation found. When he returned, Duhart let him go to a bathroom to rinse his mouth.

The school district concluded the allegation against Duhart was substantiated. The school board on Wednesday approved a 10-day suspension without pay.

The National Institutes of Health recommends that people who swallow it seek medical help.

WTKR reports that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning to the maker of Purell hand sanitizer to stop making unproven claims that the product can help eliminate diseases like Ebola, MRSA and the flu.

According to CNN, the FDA’s director of compliance sent a “warning letter” to Gojo, Purell’s parent company, to stop making unproven claims for marketing purposes that could position the hand sanitizer as a pharmaceutical drug.

The letter from the FDA reportedly notes that Purell says on its website and on social media that the sanitizer “kills more than 99.99% of the most common germs that may cause illness in a healthcare setting, including MRSA & VRE.” Purell and Gojo also note that “Purell Advanced Gel, Foam, and Ultra-Nourishing Foam Hand Sanitizer products demonstrated effectiveness against a drug resistant clinical strain of Candida auris in lab testing.

Finally, the FDA chastized Purell for claiming on the Q&A section on its website that the product can be “effective against viruses such as the Ebola virus, norovirus and influenza.” The FDA says it is not aware of any hand sanitizers that have been tested against Ebola.

My first reaction to any food safety claim, policy or recommendation is, are fewer people going to barf?

Which greeting is the cleanest?

I usually don’t get an answer.

Because it’s really hard to associate policy with rates of barfing.

A couple of weeks ago, Karen Weintraub of The New York Times wrote: With the recent increase in use of sanitizers (hand lotions, wipes for supermarket carts, etc.) has there been any real impact on transmission of colds, flu or other diseases?

The short answer is no one knows, because no one has studied whether hand sanitizers have cut down on the number of infectious diseases among the public at large.

On a personal level, good hand hygiene clearly can make a difference in health. A 2008 study in The American Journal of Public Health concluded that improvements in hand hygiene, regardless of how the participants cleaned their hands, cut gastrointestinal diseases by 31 percent, and respiratory infections by 21 percent.

The key to stopping disease is breaking the chain that allows pathogens to be transmitted from person to person. Either hand washing or sanitizing can do that.

Sally Bloomfield, an expert in hand hygiene and an honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said she always carries hand sanitizer with her when she travels. “London airport bathrooms are usually fine because they are well designed to make sure we wash our hands properly — and dry them properly,” she said, but some train “loos” leave something to be desired.

Grocery carts can be particularly risky points of transmission. Someone grabbing chicken or meat can leak the juices onto a cart and their hands, and then continue to push the cart around, transmitting pathogens like Salmonella and E. coli onto the handle. The next person who handles the cart, or the next child who sits in the top of the wagon, can then pick up the bugs.

“If you can wipe down the handle bars on the shopping cart with an alcohol-containing preparation, that’s probably a good idea,” said Dr. Cody Meissner, chief of the division of pediatric infectious disease at Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.

That said, Dr. Meissner and others cautioned against germaphobia. Every surface around us is coated in bacteria and other microbes, the vast majority of which are neutral or beneficial, said Liz Scott, chairwoman of the department of public health at Simmons College in Boston.

“We really need to target our hygiene practices,” she said, focusing on likely chains of transmission. That means washing your hands when you get back from the grocery store, public transit or any other public place, said Dr. Scott, who also admits to avoiding handshakes whenever possible, especially during flu season.

Fist bump.

(The pic, above left, is from a TV commercial Dettol shot at Sorenne’s school – she’s one of the blurred out kids, second row, far right).

Hand washing is the primary barrier to prevent transmission of enteric pathogens via cross-contamination from infected persons. Conventional hand washing involves the use of water, soap, and friction to remove dirt and microorganisms. The availability of hand sanitizing products for use when water and soap are unavailable has increased in recent years. The aim of this systematic review was to collate scientific information on the efficacy of hand sanitizers compared with washing hands with soap and water for the removal of foodborne pathogens from the hands of food handlers.

An extensive literature search was carried out using three electronic databases: Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed. Twenty-eight scientific publications were ultimately included in the review. Analysis of this literature revealed various limitations in the scientific information owing to the absence of a standardized protocol for evaluating the efficacy of hand products and variation in experimental conditions. However, despite conflicting results, scientific evidence seems to support the historical skepticism about the use of waterless hand sanitizers in food preparation settings.

Water and soap appear to be more effective than waterless products for removal of soil and microorganisms from hands. Alcohol-based products achieve rapid and effective inactivation of various bacteria, but their efficacy is generally lower against nonenveloped viruses. The presence of food debris significantly affects the microbial inactivation rate of hand sanitizers.

Efficacy of instant hand sanitizers against foodborne pathogens compared with hand washing with soap and water in food preparation settings: A systematic review

Vice reported that this disturbing trend has forced Swedish pharmacists to remove hand sanitizers from store shelves and “restrict it to behind-the-counter sales.” Apparently, police officers first asked pharmacists in the Värmland region to do so after they noticed an uptick in teens getting sick from alcohol-based products. Several emergency calls made on New Years Eve involved people under the age of 20 — the legal age to purchase alcohol in Sweden — who said that they had drunk “alcogels,” a police spokesman told The Local.

The trend originated in neither the U.S. nor Sweden but in New Zealand, with the help of social broadcasting channels like YouTube, CNN reported. Swedish police officials told public broadcaster Swedish Radio that there are videos of teens are mixing hand sanitizers with orange juice to essentially make knock-off screwdrivers.

It’s commonly known that alcohol can kill germs, which is why it’s present in many popular hygiene and cleaning products; beyond hand sanitizer, a product that contains 60 percent alcohol, it can be found in mouthwash and even Windex.

The alleged incident happened in December just before winter break, and according to the police report, three students between ages 9 and 10 at Elba Elementary School, located between Rochester and Buffalo, were involved.

Their plan was to expose a teacher to anti-bacterial products because she is highly allergic to them.

The report, provided by the Genesee County Sheriff’s Department, said, “the suspects made comments to other students that they were going to kill (the teacher) by putting antibacterial products around the classroom.”

Jackie Woodward, owner of the Woodhouse Early Learning Centre, has spoken of the “horrific” few days she and her staff have endured after the girl was hospitalized in a drunken stupor shortly after leaving the childhood premises.

The girl was picked up by her mother from the center at 5.30pm on Monday.

But the mother soon became alarmed at her behavior and rushed her to hospital, where she collapsed into a nurse’s arms and was later diagnosed as being intoxicated. Her alcohol reading was 188mg, nearly four times over the legal driving limit.

Woodward said they believed the girl had climbed onto a bookshelf and reached the hand sanitzser connected to the wall above while the on-duty staff member was putting on a load of washing in another room.

The mother has criticized Woodward’s staff for failing to pick up that her daughter was drunk.

Woodward, who has removed the hand sanitizer from its position and put it in a locked room, said she would not be using the product again, instead sourcing non-alcoholic hand cleaning products.

About 10 years ago, around SARS, a public health friend in Toronto said that hospitals were having trouble keeping sanitizer units filled in public wards and emergency rooms. Seemed that people with an alcohol dependency and little cash were stealing and drinking it. Around the same time I was told a similar story about stuff missing from a farmer’s hygiene tool storage area: When the temporary labor left the farm, so did the sanitizer.

Last year Alberta health folks changed their policies around providing hand sanitizer following the death of a man in an RCMP cell who was suspected of ingesting some, along with anti-depressants, while at a hospital.

According to Perez Hilton, a Pennsylvania man copped to being a repeat acquirer of large amounts of free sanitizer for drinks.

A man in Pennsylvania has admitted to stealing 12 bottles of hand sanitizer from the UPMC Hospital in Altoona.

The man, 51-year-old Lee Ammerman, was caught because an employee saw him stealing a bottle in October when he tried to hide it in an arm sling AND then recognized him doing it again in December!

BUT, get this, when confronted by cops about stealing the sanitizer, Lee didn’t even deny it!

In fact, he confessed to what he was actually using it for! (why so many exclamation marks? -ben)

He said:“I mix the liquid with orange juice.”

With the increase in publicly-available alcohol-based sanitizer comes the unintended consequence of being a target for theft.

According to lohud.com, a likely outbreak of norovirus has made at least 30 students of Corcodia College ill.

It was first reported on the 800-student campus Friday. Within a couple of days, 30 students contracted the virus and four wound up in Lawrence Hospital Center in Bronxville.

Katherine Chiciaza, 18, was in the school library Saturday morning when she became nauseous.
“I had to come back to the dorm and throw up in the bathroom,” she said. “I felt like that the whole day.”
The college sent out an email to students and staff, urging them to take precautions to avoid the virus, such as cleaning hands, and to stay hydrated if they get it.

The school also dispatched cleaning crews, twice a day, to sanitize all common areas, from the dining halls to dorms and classrooms.

Vittoria Rubino, 21, of the Bronx was armed with hand sanitizer and alcohol pads Tuesday as she arrived for class.
“I work in the writing center, so I’ve sterilized the keyboard because everyone uses them,” Rubino said. “I know I’m getting a little crazy.”

While hand sanitizer has its uses, reducing norovirus spread isn’t one of them. Pretty much all commercially available hand sanitizers suck when it comes to reducing norovirus viability. Same with the alcohol-containing wipes. All Vittoria is probably doing is spreading virus particles around.